Art Minimal & Conceptual Only

Kiki Smith

Drawings and objects by New York artist Kiki Smith.

Since Descartes the human body has been harnessed into a controlled structure of taboos and prohibitions and made by way of a series of measures of repression into an object of modern medicine where it is described and referred to only in terms of its deficiencies. The body is allowed to speak only through its diseases. The sanatorium, like that in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, becomes the place where the bodies and their organs converse.

The treatment of illness is reduced in modern medicine to a treatment of the body. It separates the patient from the disease, disregarding the unity of mind and body, essential for a w/holistic healing.

The Cartesian body/mind split as a schizophrenic condition is apparent in the case history of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge who began psychiatric treatment in 1884 and whose own published account of his illness was later used by Freud in his Psycho-Analytical Notes Upon an Autobiographical Case on Paranoia. Schreber suffered from a distorted body image that made him believe, among other things, that his stomach and his intestines had disappeared. In Anti-Oedipus Guattari and Deleuze showed that the schizophrenic "body without organs" is a product of Capitalism. The body/mind schizophrenia has become the inexhaustible content of "horror" stories and films, from Kafka's Metamorphosis to Cronenberg's The Fly.

Kiki Smith's work is to be understood as a discourse of the body unlike that of Mann's Magic Mountain. In it the body and its organs and fluids talk not through disease and death but through life, reunited with the mind, as a needful aesthetic power. Her work confronts the classical beauty of the (exterior) human body with the vital beauty of its guts. It reminds us that by dissociating ourselves from body and nature we dissociate ourselves from life and it brings to mind Marx's notion of a metabolism with nature: we can only live in an exchange of what we are not, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink.

© Copyright, Klaus Ottmann 1989